Veni, vidi but does he have what it takes to vici?

If Matteo Renzi is to successfully relaunch his political career, the former Italian prime minister needs to reinvent himself.

The “strong young man” of Italian politics stepped down in December, after he failed to win a referendum on proposed constitutional reforms. In that contest, everyone outside of his tight political circle was arrayed against him: the right, the populists and an unreliable left-wing minority in his own Democratic Party.

The dissenters in Renzi’s party have left the fold, and he is now running for reelection as its leader, facing off two challengers: Justice Minister Andrea Orlando and Michele Emiliano, the governor of Puglia.

Last week, Renzi traveled to California in search “of ideas on how to beat populism and relaunch the left.” He could have saved himself some air miles. Renzi has a model for success next door, in France’s Emmanuel Macron.

Whether the independent French candidate has a chance of becoming his country’s president is still in doubt. There’s no guarantee that he will win the first round of the elections in April, or its second round, where he would almost certainly face off against the far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, no easy competitor.

But even now, Macron is already a success story. First, he managed to appear as the new man of the political system, notwithstanding his close ties as a key adviser and minister in President François Hollande’s government. Second, he has proved to be equally appealing to members of the electorate both on the right and on the left-of-center.

François Mitterrand, the hero of the French socialists and an astute head of state for 17 years (1981-1996), used to mock this kind of maneuvering in the center of the political spectrum as “ni de gauche, ni de gauche.”

After all, in the European political context, centrists are essentially rightist — and that’s an identity that Renzi needs to embrace.

Renzi as a political and cultural phenomenon, has been for some years the Italian incarnation of a new left à la former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. And indeed, especially as reactions to their political predecessors — Margaret Thatcher and Silvio Berlusconi respectively — the two are perfectly aligned. Both men tried to destroy the old guard ideology and to build a country in which economic and social liberalism would not be considered the arch enemy of a socialist vision of the modern society.

Renzi brought his party into the Party of European Socialists, the pan-European socialist family, but he kept the style of a market-oriented premier. And at home, his effort to overcome the cleavage between left and right and give birth to a so-called partito della nazione — a national party — has been relatively unsuccessful.

But there are many more ways of being a socialist than recipes for cooking eggs. If Renzi is to succeed, he will need to redefine himself as the champion of an open, responsible society — one that can provide effective solutions to Italy’s problems, which are growth, debt, labor and fiscal stress. And he will have to convince the left that this is a legitimate aspiration, not a treacherous attempt to bury old ideals.

Giuliano Ferrara is the founding editor of Il Foglio.

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Emanuele

Ugly model: if Macron will win, he will win only thanks to the French electoral system, and not for its own merits (and thanks to a fair amount of luck, too…); in Italy, by contrast, it seems to loom a proprotional reform of the electoral system.
Anyway, even assuming a direct race Renzi / “Grillo”, is well known that the center-right would prefer the latter: Renzi has too often put the finger in the most painful sores, he is and will be perceived (for a long time) as the man who “builds bridges and not walls” for immigrants, the man of gay marriage, the man of electoral tips: in short, he will have a lot of work to redefine its image in the direction you proposed.
In short, he looks like a man with a great future behind him: better to move on, and look for other figures.